Articles...
Nov 11 2008
More than 30 years had gone since last I saw Pablo. He lived then in the high flats overlooking the docks. Everyone called him Pablo because he looked like a young soldier home from some Mexican revolution – with the hat, gaudy shirt, neckerchief, black hair and the slow-staring brown eyes, which settled in your soul, like the picture of a gambling man rocking lazily on his chair while checking the aces and jacks in his hand....
Nov 5 2008
CAN you sing? I realise it is rather forward of me to ask, a bit like enquiring after the state of your lumbago or whether you had second helpings of roast potatoes on Sunday....
Nov 5 2008
CAN you sing? I realise it is rather forward of me to ask, a bit like enquiring after the state of your lumbago or whether you had second helpings of roast potatoes on Sunday....
Oct 31 2008
GAP. The one that now definitely exists between London and the rest. For years, probably centuries, including the often mis-quoted two-nations line attributed to Disraeli, there has always been a gap between how the folk live, think and act in London, and those outside....
Oct 28 2008
“You’ll never be a romantic lead, but you would be perfect as the dull-witted village cow-herder, who loses his trousers in the pond,” observed the curate, a celebrated halitosis sufferer and collector of rare moth wings, when he was casting the church youth club’s Christmas panto....
Oct 22 2008
THERE was something afoot at the dry cleaners – judging by the funny feeling in the air and panicked look in the manager’s eye as I pushed open the door....
Oct 17 2008
NANO. All that’s left when you’ve tried macro and micro. We’ve had the top-down multi-billion macro schemes like improved infrastructure and inner-city refurbishments. We’ve had multi-million micro schemes like computers and laptops for all, but somehow we don’t seem to have come up with a regeneration programme that reaches the parts others don’t....
Oct 15 2008
LAST night, I dreamt I was walking through an urban landscape that was both familiar and unknown....
Oct 14 2008
‘DO YOU know where we were 16m years ago,” asked our son, sitting at the kitchen table between wobbling hills of homework, as his cornflakes sighed in their bowl under the insistent press of flowing milk....
Oct 8 2008
I AM beginning to feel my life is being swamped by more lists than you find in a Nick Hornby novel – so many, in fact, that I’m soon going to have to write another list to remember them all....
